Limited resources makes the real world 'real'

[Prokofy Neva]

1 hour ago, Mollymews said:

i quote these two thoughts together as I think there is a relationship between the two

 

 

The Lindens used to fetishize the idea that the world was for residents -- or Residents as they still call us reverently which always jars the ear because in fact they don't revere us. Oz made this moving speech about the new owner who asked him about this or that as he did his exit interview but then Gurley made a comment like "It must be all about the Residents." Well, that's nice, but at another level it's a faux corporate shtick. How can it be "about the Residents" when they cannot participate in decision-making even as advisory councils or rubber-stamp parliaments of the type Putin has; when they are punished for criticism on the forums and have no inworld free media or independent judiciary? No, companies can't be run like democracies, but then don't put in the trappings of one and say that your world product is not really for us; we're the product.

The prim hoarding was at first something the Lindens did NOT stop because their friends and coders and builders experimenting with the world were stockpiling prims and making big prim cathedrals, so if some clueless newb moved in who wasn't in that culture of coders feted in Silicon Valley and soon to be the entire country, and complained that he couldn't put out a chair because Jason and Jared had hogged all the prims on the sim, the Lindens didn't have to care, the newb wasn't a Creator. M Linden was only the most blatant purveyor of the "content is king" school of thought on the "platform" and the jettisoning of the world. We are not customers, we're residents in an asylum or a nursing home. Except we really are just customers because there's no world.

Phil had the most appalling ideas and practices back in the day. He let abandoned land fall into chunks of 16m precisely because he thought THIS was the way to distribute prims more equitably. Many a newb, including me, accidentally abandoned their hard-won first land by pushing the wrong button, so that hoards of ad farmers, as they came to be known, could chew up the 16m squares and not those Creatives. I can so vividly see a well-known furry in the land business literally chopping up all the land that wouldn't sell into 16m squares and a flock of people worrying about the view coming to buy them at extortionist prices. It took way too long for the Lindens to stop that idiotic chunking function upon abandonment like it took them way to long to get rid of the "First Land" program benefiting mainly First Bots.

He also said flatly that he disliked arbitrage, that he thought all land should be rolled out by Lindens for $5/meter and kept artificially at that flat price whether waterfront or back woods. Philip personally idealized the idea of $5/meter land, even as he told that foundational myth that impressed me as a newbie and others about "Buzz, the real estate dealer" who would swoop in and gather newbies up in a helicopter and sell them homes or land. In fact, there never was any Buzz like that, but instead Cubey and his airport which was made a special attraction from the orientation island, then the Mentors, who slung notecards filled with their friends' stores' LMs to keep them all in their content circle.

I had many debates with him on this subject as did others. What's always amazing about socialist dictators is that ordinary people always just keep rolling ahead and defeating them by selling to each other on an open market no matter how much they try to control them, ascribing their own value and not the dictators' value to their products or the land itself.

I so well remember when Cory left, in something of a huff after a big argument with Philip over open source -- not about user content. He had just succeeded in "liberating" the viewer by first having his griefer pals in libsl "reverse engineer" the viewer, then not punish them under the TOS for reverse engineering, then presenting Philip with a fait accompli -- behind which stood the destroyed value of my land or others who suffered from ad farms and griefing. There was no zoning. Zoning is what people who value land in an economy do. The Lindens only just started zoning in Bellissaria.

Cory wanted all of SL to be liberated, and Philip, who came from a family of teachers and was an electrical engineer and computer specialist who worked on compression at Real, a profitable capitalist company, and wasn't someone with a background in the Navy and the NSA like Cory, i.e. in government even with his hipster views, did not want to liberate something that enabled the company to be a company, and get investments - the server code. He held firm about not caving to extremist liberationist Lindens. This is like the ffamous article "The Two Chiles" if not "The Two Cultures."  Otherwise SL would be something on a back page at git hub now and not a profit-making concern.

But right around that time the Lindens decided that the user content that they had put on a pedestal ideologically with all kinds of open source cult beliefs was in fact crappy, and they were embarrassed for the big businesses like IBM to see it. IBM had their own computer programmers and graphic artists, one of whom made the Far Away, superior to most user content, and another of whom had a great influence on the architecture. Or rather, they were embarrassed to have swanky PR firms like Crayon to see it, the kind of people who know that this season's colours are peach, melba, and toast. The "business" boom in SL as you know was really about a PR firm boom. That is, they aren't called PR firms anymore, and when you read their descriptions, it's hard to tell WHAT they are, as they might have another name like "solutions provider" leaning more toward code, or actually be media companies bringing in something like a TV show to SL. But it's still advertising.

 

 

 

Edited February 27, 2021 by Prokofy Neva

[Prokofy Neva]

On 2/24/2021 at 9:11 PM, Rowan Amore said:

I'll take a hard pass on any virtual world creeping closer to RL.

The reason the pandemic was bearable -- just -- at least in some regions of the first and second worlds was because virtuality had already begun to be incorporated via social media, real estate tours, phone apps and much more that virtualized existence via cell phones and desktops. There's no superhero jumping out from the bushes created on a computer to interrupt your real life walk home and you can't really try on that virtual dress yet in your home through a smart mirror. But it's coming.

[Prokofy Neva]

3 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

p 2

 

I can remember distinctly sitting with a Linden who was let go for bad behaviour with residents and poor performance in the office mocking user content which in fact was mockable. And another Linden awkwardly explaining in some kind of office hour or group meeting that they really had to produce some of the stuff themselves because they needed to bring in more people used to WoW where the devs made the world entirely except for the odd mod here and there made by users, often illegal.

What's odd is that when they came to this conclusion, their answer was not to start making separate houses, or more swag bags or monthly fatpacks of things THEMSELVES. That comes very, very seldom. Instead, they hired the very, very best of their creative friends inworld and let them put their stuff in the library or handed them sweet contracts with the big RL businesses. Remember Electric Sheep and such, the "Big Six".

So that's why we see avatars but odd packets of textures still there tho they are long past the sell-date. They told the Nebraska people who wanted copyable material on full perms yet still to be sealed off from the open mainland and island clusters that they could buy in a special store, like Russian officials in the beriozka, certain high-end content from the very best creators whose wares would essentially have their perms broken on the way to being put on a sim, then reset and copied by not copying to give to the businesses. I and a few others cried very, very loudly about this for so many reasons, copyright, favouritism, RenFaire culture, blocking out of every mom and pop store that might have a good coffee pot and bagels to sell to a corporation for their sim builds. There'd be a REASON to stay in SL after the big elephants tramped in if you could get free swag from them and also sell themr your stuff.

They created the exclusive "Solutions Providers List" to which they first tried to give a heads up of their retiring of sims and their ability to get them at bargain basement "grandfather" prices. Until literally I was the one to blow the whistle on this, they were going to give away sims at prices no one else would get. They were forced to open up sales and sell more of them than they wished, just like they had to compensate land barons for telehubs when they decided to pull them as "laggy and unsightly" -- even though they themselves had spent months auctioning them at huge prices and setting them down in bucolic fields among grazing deer -- a bait and switch which they were helped to understand meant that they had to buy them back at $7/m. They then got revenge buy opening up a huge corridor of sandy sims not contiguous with the mainland yet still mainland and forcing monopolists who got the $7 buyback to eat them to stay at the top of the market.

The Lindens did not decide their own full-time staff would be the people to make World of Warcraft type stuff or like Raph Koster's games. Instead, they hired Moles at low wages, favorited a few of their best creator friends in the special lists, and sold in closed stores like  Communists for Politburo members. Instead, like all socialists, they made committees of only themselves and their friends to allocate resources and then were forced to reform to open markets and then became oligarchs. They merely recapitulate the same patterns you can see in RL.

The land parceling with set prims was a compromise I think Philip was forced to make with board members who needed to get their money out of SL in one piece.

Philip did not want islands. He wanted the world to be communal and contiguous - but without putting in the governance work to make it liveable and attractive. When flight to the suburbs naturally ensued, the first islands worked terribly. There was a group of oldbies complaining bitterly about their performance at every turn. Finally they got that piece right and decided this is how they could make money. It wasn't at the center of their SWAT diagram taught at Yale or Harvard, but it paid. Philip had these illusions about communities and the mainland and hippie togetherness although he was too young to be a hippie. But, you know, California and the California Ideology about tech

I can't tell you the deep shock I encountered when once Philip came inworld to my sim to see what I meant about groups. While trying to help customers on a public computer at the first SLCC meet-up, Peter came over and looked over my shoulder and I explained why I was forced to maintain 10 avatars to hold my groups together -- each one needed 3 to be founded, and they could be intertwined, but I had to make sure I had enough in each group to stop officer recall, which was this insane system whereby anyone in the group could vote you off the island, even if you paid the island tier.

Then he saw in world how the non-group prims were returned and such and the point of having group land with the bonus. I was deeply shaken. Philip had pushed the socialist Lindens into allowing real  inworld real estate sales, something some Lindens thought should be illegal, and enabled the land market creation which created jobs and income and equity for non-coders and non-artists and made the society more robust and viable. He had pushed for certain other things so he surely must have had some grasp of what these tools did. But he had never sat and worked them or saw why someone worked them. Seeing me cancel five of my 10 accounts(we were allowed only 5), seeing me write on each one an explanation that I had kept them to control my own land to shield it from officer recall, and reading my famous blog post about LL as a pizzeria, we were finally able to turn the corner on those hippie collective tools -- but without a tremendous uproart from the furry communities who thought groups should not have one owner only, but should enable the instant, simultaneous, creation in real time of multiple owners, like a socialist collective. The Lindens finally compromised with the one owner being first, to the furries' dismay, but that owner could then in tern instantly create others all with the same powers, after reading a scare message that this couldn't be turned back.

The Lindens had so many governance problems -- as world makers who insist on being platforms do -- that they decided to make this sort of "socialism on one sim" concept that the TOS would be modified so that basically, any individual island owner would have the tools to enforce it himself, without calling Lindens. For this purpose, the Lindens were going to bend the rules for Gor so that anyone with a beef without another Gor harassing or stalking them or fire-primming them would take it up with the Gorean master on that sim who paid the tier, and the ARs would essentially be re-routed back to them, with the Lindens not involved in "self-governance". This was Daniel Linden's vision (a Daniel Linden at the time) and some of us were appalled. They did scrap that notion.

I'm happy to hear contrary memories of the Lindens and different takes on what you think they were doing if you were there because we don't know, really. It's a closed society. We have to piece together what they were from this and that shard. It's like the anthropologists discovering the site of the child sacrifices recently, in which not just white northerners were involved as usual, but locally trained Peruvian anthropologists, and they finally made a new hypothesis, that the children were murdered not because they had no value for young lives and had some blood-thirsty obscure cult to satisfy cynical gods with babies' death, but because they faced an impossible situation of climate change that ruined their livelihood, and they decided if they could give those gods of the weather the most precious thing they had, what they held dear, they could appease them. Change the elements of this fable with terms like "user content" and "solutions providers" and "real world business" and you might have a working hypothesis. But we don't know. They wrote a fake corporate history done by some hireling which doesn't tell you anything real.

Philip still natters on about the rich getting richer, including himself and wow, such a mystery. He is hurt when my criticism of SL is quoted in the New York Times. And actually I'm the supporter of capitalism and he's the technosocialist -- I appreciate small and medium business and individual proprietors and want a WORLD not a PLATFORM where they are provided for and thrive, and he's only bringing in giant businesses that crush the little inworld economy and siphon off the best creators and programmers as their own contractors building big malls and office buildings and colleges and not elven glades and beach homes. If only Sears had sold little washers and dryers for our homes, perhaps they'd still be in business. Instead, they wanted us to come and click on their URL yanker to the Internet, something we didn't need SL for.

 

 

Edited February 27, 2021 by Prokofy Neva

[Prokofy Neva]

On 2/25/2021 at 1:43 AM, Coffee Pancake said:

Philip's been wrong about a lot of things. I would add "manufactured scarcity of virtual resources" to that list.

 

So should the plan have been have his paid workers keep producing code for free and people in the world producing content? How would they stay in business? Who would be paying for them to endlessly lay out servers in the server farm? What would the business plan be?

[Coffee Pancake]

28 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

So should the plan have been have his paid workers keep producing code for free and people in the world producing content? How would they stay in business? Who would be paying for them to endlessly lay out servers in the server farm? What would the business plan be?

Maybe charging more for asset uploads 😘

[Prokofy Neva]

1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Maybe charging more for asset uploads 😘

They have a system of sinks for asset uploads where you can go through US $10 easily creating some little wooden box.

I'm not a rainbow socialist unicorn. I am for ethical free markets. We live in a country that regulates markets and which exists under the rule of law. I'm not for discarding that in the quest for some unicorn "equity".

To put the burden of all the costs of SL on to the texture or sound upload is cruel. It punishes the creators who labor to produce content as well as casual users.

There's no reason not to tie the value and the scarce resources to land, which is a rough equivalent to real life,

 

[Prokofy Neva]

On 2/25/2021 at 4:44 PM, Mollymews said:

on this part

for sure, is definitely a calculation that has a lot of parameters that have to be taken into consideration when trying to find a reasonable balance.  With mesh uploads Linden do try to address this by equating a L$ cost to the resource cost/impact of the uploaded item

NRC attempts to address the the resource cost to the uploader when the item (or copy of) is transferred to another person

 

Funny as we are having this discussion I noticed this article claiming

Developer Linden Lab has “introduced artificial scarcity and precarity to its virtual economy for no particular reason but to collect rent on it.”
 

It assumes artificial scarcity and precarity already exist (I suppose the "precarity" in SL is frequent inventory loss and autoreturn). And it doesn't allow for free accounts that aren't going to necessarily experience scarcity as they could just endlessly fly along and hang out in free hangout areas or sandboxes, never spending a dime or a Linden.

It also is not sufficiently sophisticated to understand a virtual economy that in fact is tied to the platform provider's own real-world economy, i.e. the sale of server space.

So it's not a world in which we fly around and have battles and collect XP and magical swords or something, but a token that can be exchanged ultimately just to pay for our use of server space, or above that amount, to cash out.

I really have no use for Zuboff because I'm not a socialist but I can't help thinking that the thinking that went on furiously around 2007-2010 when SL got the attention of big PR and big business and various academics even had space here has not been updated.

[Prokofy Neva]

On 2/24/2021 at 8:57 PM, Paul Hexem said:

I think you're overthinking a passing statement. 

I don't think it's passing, as Philip has thought about these issues a great deal, he invented some of them in fact, without even realizing it at times I think, he has revised his thinking based on his actual experience. I think Philip is a very important figure to follow through his development and see what he actually finds interesting to be engineering at any given moment. There he is focusing on sound and making it 3D which is something that I have little interest in beyond putting sound files into SL environments. I remember noticing that one thing about Sansara that was better was the ease and diversity of sound placement. I could be wrong, but I don't have the same sense that when I put sound on a sim there is a calculation that is making it go louder as I approach based on my movement, and not on my proximity to it and how loud I've set the player code.

 

But Philip managed to be doing this just as Clubhouse arrived and took the world by storm the way Twitter once had, and Clubhouse is based on people having conversations in voice.

[Mollymews]

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Funny as we are having this discussion I noticed this article claiming

Developer Linden Lab has “introduced artificial scarcity and precarity to its virtual economy for no particular reason but to collect rent on it.”
 

is an interesting statement. Some thoughts

if by precarity the writer of the article linked, means that the economic rewards flow from the efforts put in by SL producer/creatives on an individual basis are precarious, due to the way Linden have designed the system of resident-to-resident economic engagement then I can see the point being made

if by artificial scarcity the writer means that this precarity is artificially induced by scarcity then I would disagree with this interpretation at least in the SL resident-to-resident economy. There is no scarcity of resident workforce labour in SL

i think basically is more that when a workforce is casualised to in effect be no different to voluntary participatory workers (work/engage as when they please) then income per individual worker can be precarious. Worker in this sense also meaning business person (person crafting away in their kitchen, pickup lawnmowing business person, etc)

i think as well that precarity as it can be applied to SL resident-to-resident economic engagement is compounded by the value-pricing model that voluntary workforces typically engage as they go about their business. Meaning that the price is set at a value to them the seller, which can sometimes have no relationship to the actual effort/time that the seller puts in to creating the product. Which manifests itself quite often in the range of resident-made products available for purchase in SL

[Prokofy Neva]

5 minutes ago, Mollymews said:

is an interesting statement. Some thoughts

if by precarity the writer of the article linked, means that the economic rewards flow from the efforts put in by SL producer/creatives on an individual basis are precarious, due to the way Linden have designed the system of resident-to-resident economic engagement then I can see the point being made

if by artificial scarcity the writer means that this precarity is artificially induced by scarcity then I would disagree with this interpretation at least in the SL resident-to-resident economy. There is no scarcity of resident workforce labour in SL

i think basically is more that when a workforce is casualised to in effect be no different to voluntary participatory workers (work/engage as when they please) then income per individual worker can be precarious. Worker in this sense also meaning business person (person crafting away in their kitchen, pickup lawnmowing business person, etc)

i think as well that precarity as it can be applied to SL resident-to-resident economic engagement is compounded by the value-pricing model that voluntary workforces typically engage as they go about their business. Meaning that the price is set at a value to them the seller, which can sometimes have no relationship to the actual effort/time that the seller puts in to creating the product. Which manifests itself quite often in the range of resident-made products available for purchase in SL

I think that the author's statement is far too cynical and harsh and reveals no understanding about Linden Lab, which isn't some rent-seeking asset-stripping monster, and as far as I can tell, although we can't be sure, isn't going to turn into one under the new owners. The Lindens don't have malicious intent because they don't plan that far in advance in the way you'd have to in order to have malicious intent, at least, they didn't in the earlier start-up years.

I think the precarity is meant to mean an inworld situation where you can, oh, lose all your XP if you step into the dreaded Slough of Despond on some dragon fortress sim or something. I don't *think* they mean, if you can lose your magic dragon fishing rod content that you spent US $56 on because hackers got your game master's fishing camp back end somehow. Although in SL, that definitely has to be built in for a consideration of precarity. I would consider inventory loss, which is frequent, the built-in precarity. I think theorists generally mean the kind occuring with death in the game or loss of XP or swag or whatever in the gaming mechanics itself.

There is no scarcity of workforce, but there is scarcity of trusted, reliable workforce, you know, like the aging and ill Nomandland workers at Amazon. In 17 years, I have not found a trusted and reliable worker in SL except my own RL son, who graduated from the teen grid, but he's too busy generally with RL business. I think this is a real and true scarcity.

If you sit down and isolate the workforce tasks in SL, there are some like bouncers at bars, dancers, escorts, etc at clubs, or tutorial helpers at infohubs if they are a business although usually there aren't, or bloggers and PR helpers at stores that in a way don't require high trust or reliability which is why businesses go through scores of them. If you have ever been in a merchants' group for events and seen the enormous kill rate of bloggers for stealing and not blogging the free fatpacks, you see the high risk from the perspective of the merchant. But since some of them pay real money, find real people with real names through Discord and Facebook and have them for years, it is possible. Since loss of a merchant fatpack isn't a loss as the merchant obviously lost a sale but not the content itself, it's copyable, it's not so high risk.

Once you get out of this service realm involving services and intangibles and not stock, as I like to think of it, although land is still virtual, it becomes enormously hazardous. If you give someone the power to parcel or sell your land or even just run a ban list they can cause enormous havoc including land loss and customer loss if they turn on you. Even so, I see rental agencies that can afford Welcome Wagon type people, people willing to role-play concierge or listing agent in SL (I'm not), etc. and pay them anything from nothing to $500L to US $50 a week or more. Obviously a good rentals agent if you are in business with 100s of island sims is worth their weight in gold and crucial to their business. This world goes on under intense privacy and lack of scrutiny preciously because of the risk of hackers and ill-wishers and jealous former lovers etc. in an unaccountable virtual world.

I'm not an economist and didn't hardly study economics in school so I can't really provide an informed comment about "the value-pricing model that voluntary workforces typically engage as they go about their business" except to say that in SL, the capacity of people to work for nothing, like 50L a day or 500L a week or even 5000 a week, which is only US $20, is endless, because you can always find someone who just wants to pay for their virtual shoes because they don't need SL to pay for their actual real food.

 

 

[LilyBell Snoodle]

Resource allocation is an interesting concept, to be sure. We have had this on our roleplay cluster for some time,  via a "for something to happen here, it has to actually happen here" thing - which does have its limitations but might be an interesting model for anyone looking at user behavior in situations where there are limited resources.  If anyone is actively (or passively) working in this area, or wants to dialog about it in depth, please do send me an IM and I will be happy to go into greater detail about how it was implemented, how it works, problems, pitfalls. The short form here is that for a certain subset of the population, this "having to earn credits (a physical object with no L$ value ) to buy things from each other" and "building a roleplay business by developing and using strategy and fostering relationships (or not)"  seems to provide a viable way for people to learn how real-world interactions can make or break an organization (among other lessons).  I don't know if any of the lessons learned would be of use in modeling some sort of actual in-world "limited resource" model, but they might.  

[animats]

It's a classic problem in game balance design. It's easy to botch. Dual Universe just botched it. Dual Universe is a huge MMO, with multiple planets. It allows building, but you have to mine resources first. However, you can  write programs and automate some of that.

Luca Grabacr, who's well known in SL, went over there and went to work, streaming her progress on Youtube. She started out going around and mining rocks, like everybody else. Soon she had a base, and some ships. After three months, she was up to "Fur Admiral Luca", with three huge spacegoing aircraft carriers loaded with small craft, a base, an large automated mining plant, manufacturing facilities, and a large temple.

Then Dual Universe changed the rules. People were building too much.

The users are angry.

That didn't end well.

 

[Mollymews]

19 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

There is no scarcity of workforce, but there is scarcity of trusted, reliable workforce

it can be more difficult to establish resident-to-resident trust in SL than it can be in the real world. This is not to say that trust can't be established, just that the path to trust in SL can be a little more fraught/difficult depending on circumstance

due in large part to the way that Linden have designed and administer resident-to-resident interactions. Two major contributing factors are account pseudo-anonymity and non-involvement by Linden in what they deem to be resident-to-resident disputes

this is not to say that either of these are bad in themselves, there are pluses and minuses to these depending on context and circumstance. Just to say that they can make the path to establishing trust between residents a little more difficult within the different contexts/circumstances of the interaction

Edited February 28, 2021 by Mollymews
typs

[Mollymews]

13 hours ago, animats said:

It's a classic problem in game balance design. It's easy to botch.

 

The users are angry.

That didn't end well.

 

yes agree that changing the way players experience a world when the players don't play it the way the game makers envisage/expect/want them too can be unsettling for the players concerned. And when world makers do this then I think any claim they might have had to their world being 'open' is debatable

is one thing that Linden have got right with SL. People able to pretty much do what ever they want in SL in any manner they choose (subject to RL law of course). Which I think is the meaning of open